MLB 15: The Show
Summary MLB 15: The Show is a continuation of the critically acclaimed Baseball game for the Playstation. Story 30 MLB teams compete against each other for the coveted World Series title. Game Modes Play Now Play one game as a team of your choosing and compete against another team of your choosing. Franchise Pick your favorite franchises and make the right roster moves so that your franchises will come out on top. Diamond Dynasty Use Baseball Cards and have them play for your team in this mode. Road To The Show Create your own player and have him build up his Baseball abilities and make him into a MLB star. Other Modes There are other modes such as the options menu to control specific aspects of the game as well as team rosters where you can put certain players on certain teams. Johnny's Review General Thoughts You know that I am also a fan of Baseball, so I figured to give The Show another chance. Hoping that it has made the game easier to play. Graphics Of course, this is what The Show is famous for: the Graphics. The realism of this game is very close to real life (though with some differences). The backgrounds and even the character models look so life-like, that it's almost scary. The colors of the uniforms are also very close to their real world counterparts (such as the Yankees famous dark blue color being close to it's realistic counterpart). Grade: A+ Music There's not much of a soundtrack. In the menu screens, there are songs by some artists which you (or I) haven't heard of since they're not popular. Unlike in MLB 13: The Show where you can put in your own music in the game, you can't do this here (which is a minus). There's not much in the way in music when it comes to in-game scenes, though there's music when a player of the home team walks up to the plate and when a player hits a Home Run, but that's about it, the upshot to it is that you can customize the walk up and home run music for each player (including your own). Grade: C- Sounds/Voice The sounds in this game are also great and close to real life. The sounds of the bat cracking when it makes contact with the ball the sound of the players running the bases and even the sound of leather when the players catch the ball with his mitt all sound close to their real life counterparts. The voices on the other hand is left to be desired. Matt Vasgersian (a real-life MLB commentator) is still monotone as he was in previous Show installments as are the commentators that are with him. But the only plus in the voices is that the players can sometimes talk to each other to try to call off each other if one has the ball or telling each other which base to throw to, again adding to the realism of the game. Grade: B- Gameplay/Controls The realism doesn't stop in the gameplay catagory. In order to really master the game's gameplay is to know how the game of Baseball works in real life. Even if you set the difficulty to easy and set the difficulty sliders to that players on opposing teams make silly mistakes, it can still be quite difficult if not frustrating to get ahead in this game. The batting is probably the most frustrating of all as more often than not the pitcher will throw out of the strike zone to get you to chase the pitch, not good if you're used to just swinging at the first pitch and hope that it's a big base hit or a hone run. Fielding is a bit more easier to understand (depending on which position of the field you're playing). Pitching is also quite easy if you set the difficulty right. In fact, pitching is not as dynamic as it was in previous installments as is other styles of play. Baserunning though is just as hard as batting if not harder as more often than not you get picked off or you make a baserunning mistake and be called out for it. The controls are also easy to understand (especially if you like to use the buttons to control your player rather than just using the analog sticks). Of course, you can set the control style in the options menu. Grade: D+ Replay Value There are a lot of extra content in this game. You build up experience points (for extra content, not to improve your abilities) so you can earn baseball cards in use for Diamond Dynasty mode. In Road to The Show mode, you can also earn special equipment (e.g., bats, gloves, shoes and even rituals) which is to not only customize your player, but to also give him a small boost to his abilities which is a good thing especially if your player is struggling. You also earn special coins so you can buy special items like extra raining points or an item where it'll instantly heal your player if he's injured and can't play. This is not confined to Road to the Show however, you can buy items in franchise mode as well. Grade::'''A+ Final Thoughts I admit that this wasn't a terrible game. But I also like games with easy to learn gameplay and not the ones with frustrating gameplay. I think that The Show focused too much on realism and not allowing some gamers to set the difficulty where their players become legends and their favorite teams win the World Series every year. I'm kind of upset that 2K lost the license to make MLB games as their MLB games were easy to play *if* you work with the difficulty sliders. So, I'll just stick to the 2K MLB games. '''Overall Grade: C+